Ask HN: Do you think Hacker News should begin with “subreddits”?
As the quality of Reddit declines, Hacker News becomes more and more interesting as a consistent user-friendly and respectful forum for technology and science.
However, a notable difference from Reddit is the absence of the "subreddit" concept.
Do you think it would be good for Hacker News to slowly try to fill that niche? It doesn't have to be a free-for-all creation of subforums, personally I believe that manually curated categories would be useful.
Has this ever existed on HN?
51 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadIt'd also show that 1) the input of the community is valued 2) the community is less a drag/energy drain for the admin team and more of an input and 3) more expansive changes of this nature could be made and are not just a waste of submitter brainpower...
1. https://metatalk.metafilter.com/
Do you have a theory as to why Reddit is declining?
I think users happen in generations. The first users set a tone, and then later users make formal and memetic rules to enforce tone (like the monkeys with the bananas up the ladder). Without change, this sticks and places become stagnant. On the other hand, there's clearly been a huge influx in users on Reddit and they haven't managed the volume well so you have popular threads which commenting in is just pissing in an ocean of piss. When that becomes normalized, users are forced to resort to unusual behavior to get noticed, meaning being spammy, dramatic or offensive.
When a site/group is small there's little motivation for bad actors, advertising spam, fake accounts, etc. Why bother making spam bots on site X when site Y has 10x the userbase? Why try to make people angry with poor headlines when it won't reach a large audience? Why try to do propaganda when you could go elsewhere?
Smaller communities are generally also tighter knit. In a small group there's more notable reputation that sticks. People can't get away with being jerks.
As well, there's the corporate side. Reddit has to think and act very differently than HN does. They need to think about their profitability. What do advertisers think of their site? What kind of opinion does the public have of them? They can't afford to let things be loose and wild, they need to carefully control the content or the hammer could come down on them hard. That means a lot of accusations of violating "free speech".
If HN suddenly got as popular as Reddit did, the exact same things would happen to HN as Reddit. 0 doubt.
So no, it's not directly the format of reddit that is the problem. It's just the size.
I think if there's reason for a niche, starting a clone is a better idea. In fact, that's already been done, like with https://lobste.rs/
I think that all forums degrade when there's more users. When people with a passing interest in a topic start bleeding in and leaving uninformed comments, that's kind of the beginning of the end for quality.
Also, we're always talking about the "small web," and this is a great example of how to keep it smaller.
Only have a rigid set of tags, and you'll find some things just aren't covered well by the existing tags.
It takes a continuing system of moderation to gradually revise the tagging system over time to get anything good out of it.
HN's flat format is a feature: I can glance at the front page and decide what looks interesting and ignore the rest.
I dont think HN has enough sprawl to meaningfully support subreddit-like fragmentation, personally.
Might as well ask "should Apple stop selling electronics and become a company that drills for and refines oil?" Because there's about as much relevance between the two.
This is also a site filled with people way more knowledgeable about certain topics than I could ever hope to be yet still allows me to chime in from time to time because of the variety of topics that make the front page.
r/all has that randomness but it's mostly garbage, like mental fast-food.
To that end, I think personal filters would be more useful than either tags or subreddits (even though HN already has ersatz subreddits in /ask, /show and /jobs.) The hide option is already a step in that direction, but it requires being reactive, whereas filters would be proactive. Give users a field in which they can list words or domains to either include or exclude (similar to the format of USENET killfiles) and have the feed sort based on that.
Then everyone gets what they want, and hopefully fewer people pollute the threads with complaints about Hacker News "turning into Reddit" because other people find things interesting and intellectually gratifying that they don't.
Fact is, I can’t fully predict what I will find interesting so HN regularly offers me a good few dark horses that Reddit simply cannot.
Not long ago, there was a series on the history of bread. I’m sure there’s some kind of subreddit for this but I’d never have sought it out.
Also make the front page longer.
I kind of feel like subreddits would somehow end up leading to me discovering less interesting content. I feel like I come to Hacker News to discover random stuff from a very broad church that is mainly rooted in STEM but also has things that are often related such as philosophy, psychology, productivity and the like. I think something would be lost if it went down the specialist sub areas route.
I do however get the appeal. I myself have searched for “hacker news for finance” when wanting to know more about the topic and found someone else had already asked the same question on HN. Lobste.rs is very similar to hacker news but has gone down the tag route suggested in the other comments mentioned here. https://lobste.rs/about
But that's not really how subreddits work.